Publishers Visit NIH To Protest Free Access Initiative

-- Library Journal, 08/04/2004

While supporters of open access hailed a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make all taxpayer-funded NIH research freely available within six months, more than 100 publishers yesterday visited the NIH offices to voice their strong opposition. Among their complaints: the NIH tucked the measure into an appropriations bill, which denied publishers, including society publishers, the opportunity to be heard on the issue. "This measure caught publishers completely off-guard," said Barbara Meredith, VP of Professional and Scholarly Publishing at the Association of American Publishers (AAP). "This essentially mandates open access without any evidentiary hearings or studies." The meeting was hosted by NIH Chairman Elias Zerhouni, and was the first in what is expected to be a number of hearings on the proposal, including, Meredith adds, a possible colloquy sponsored by the AAP. In response to publisher outcry, Rick Johnson, director of SPARC, in a letter sent to Zerhouni yesterday, suggested that NIH had made the right choice and that publishers appeared to "misunderstand the proposal, which proposes open archiving, not open-access publication." Open archiving, Johnson said, "is not a threat to journals."

Mark Sobel, executive officer of the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP), who spoke at the NIH meeting, disputed Johnson's take. "It appears that the underlying factor behind this proposal is unsustainable subscription fees for libraries," Sobel said. "That's unfair to individual publishers." Sobel said the non-profit ASIP publishes two affordable journals a year, including the flagship journal in pathology, just barely making enough to cover its expenses and reinvest money into improving the quality of its journals, scanning backfiles, and supporting other activities. He said the NIH proposal could dip into the revenue paid to his journals by libraries, as well as cause an array of logistical problems for both researchers and the NIH.